Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  “Get the hell out of here!”

  Coriander’s small mouth drops open. She turns around in her sitting position to look over her shoulder. Nana is standing behind her with a carton of milk in her hand.

  The bird pulls back a little from the slab it was crossing, slides forward on it again, retracts again.

  “Get the hell out of here.” Nana hoists the carton higher for the bird to see.

  It vibrates, slamming the underside of its front down repeatedly on the flagstone in frustration.

  The carton hits the side of her bird, spraying white across its back and the grass.

  It lifts straight up off the terrace, into the air, hovering.

  Coriander waves desperately at it, beckoning it to her, curling her little fingers in towards her shaking chest.

  It moves across the air to the nearest tree.

  As it disappears into the high foliage, dozens of birds flap out and away.

  Coriander tries not to cry, because if she cries her tears will blind her, and she won’t be able to see where her bird goes.

  It flaps to the next tree, darkness wriggling into the green, but the birds in that treetop also wing away in all directions.

  A tear slides down.

  It tries tree after tree, each top emptying as soon as it arrives, on and on, until the trees receding in the twilight are as small as puffballs, and the birds turning their backs, specks.

  “If it comes back I’m going to kill it.”

  “She hates you!”

  “You don’t understand.” Nana absently rubs her thumb over the pads of her fingers, feeling the milk on them, glances down at the front of her silk blouse, which is soaked with milk.

  “Look at your hands.”

  Coriander balls them into fists and sticks them up her dress, out of view.

  “Don’t do that.” Nana bends over, pulls Coriander’s hands out, twists them around. “Look at your palms.”

  Coriander’s big eyes stay on Nana’s face. She scrunches up one side of her lips. “Nana, Nana, looks like a banana.”

  Nana crouches down on her haunches and slaps Coriander on the knee. “Smell them, baby.”

  Coriander brings her yellowy-orange palms up to her face. Sniffs them.

  She rolls her head back haughtily, mouth open, switching her chin left and right, upper teeth motionless.

  Her nose wrinkles.

  She wipes the side of a nostril with a yellowy-orange index finger, then leans over, throws up sugar and spice and little wriggling globs of phlegm.

  Coriander crawls like a little baby through the interior dimness past the chair legs and table legs to the archway.

  Past it, in the well-lit kitchen, Nana and Sarah are talking to each other.

  Coriander raises her eyebrows and holds her breath, settling on her stomach, face propped in her pudgy hands. Nana and Sarah’s high heels look huge and their heads look tiny from this angle.

  “You have to go.”

  Sarah puts the long knife down on the counter beside the mounds of diced vegetables. “I do, don’t I? It’s starting all over again. That’s what I keep thinking, it’s starting all over again.”

  Nana tilts her head to one side, trying to smile. She pulls a few tissues out of the wall dispenser and holds them out to Sarah.

  Sarah looks at the fluffed-out dispenser. “Did you have a conversation like this with June? Maybe even right here where we’re standing now?” Sarah stops crying long enough to laugh. “You know, I think my whole life has been shaped by conversations I’ve had in kitchens.”

  “June didn’t have your strength. She got so tired of getting her insides burned, but she wouldn’t cry. You have to. What else can you do?”

  Sarah makes a goofy face, eyes still red. “Tell me and we’ll both know.” She lowers her eyes, embarrassed.

  Nana glides over to her, putting her long nails on the top button of Sarah’s blouse.

  “You don’t have to.”

  Nana trails a nail down the bridge of Sarah’s freckled nose. “I want to, hon.”

  She undoes the buttons one by one down to the belt of Sarah’s skirt, then pulls the front tails out so the two sides of the blouse fall open.

  Sarah looks away, wobbly smile on her face, holding her arms at her sides.

  Nana raises a hand to the upper swell of her left breast. “Right here?”

  Sarah peeks down with the look of someone watching a needle go in. “That’s it. It’s so frightening when you first feel it with your fingers.”

  “It could be innocent.”

  Sarah dips her head, cleft between her black eyebrows, looking at Nana’s face. “I don’t trust my own body anymore.”

  Coriander’s bored, propped-up face glances at a shadow, above the sink, against the window. She gulps, craning her head forward to look more closely, chin lifting out of her palms.

  Three black eyes protrude against the glass, swaying slightly in the evening breeze.

  Bites her lip with her two longest teeth, looking up past the eyes tapping against the pane to the stout latch clasping the upper and lower window frames together.

  Sarah buttons the front of her blouse, watching her fingers push hard curves through soft slits. “I should probably go.”

  “Of course you should. I’m the one who told you to.”

  Sarah does the top button, drawing her collar together. “I mean go from here. From you.”

  “Stay. Please stay.” Nana reaches her hand out, but doesn’t touch Sarah’s forearm.

  “Here she is.”

  “Hi, baby, how long have you been standing there?”

  Coriander looks down at her bare feet, then up at the two tense women again. “She just stood here now.”

  “Hi, Coriander. Did you enjoy your nap?”

  Coriander nods solemnly. She raises and lowers her shoulders at Sarah. “She thinks she did.”

  Coriander waves her arms as Nana sails her backwards through the air to sit on the counter, legs dangling, beside the colorful mounds of diced vegetables. Puts a hand down on the counter to steady herself, turns around to look at the dark window above the sink. There are curly white lines scratched into the glass from the outside.

  “I have to get going, Jackie.”

  “Cory, we don’t want Aunt Sarah to go, do we?”

  Coriander scoots her rear end closer to the edge of the counter. Now she can see, past her twitching knees, the far away tiles of the floor below. She puts a hand on the top of the dishwasher door just below the countertop. It starts yawning open, steam rising out.

  “Careful, Coriander.” Sarah puts her hands on Coriander’s waist and lifts her up to her.

  “My, you’re heavy.”

  Coriander puts her arms around Sarah’s neck. “Don’t go, Aunt Sarah. My bird will eat you.”

  Sarah slides her forearm under Coriander’s rear end so she can pull her face back enough to look into the little girl’s eyes. “That thing went away, Coriander. It won’t be coming back.” She strokes the little girl’s hair. Looks across to Nana.

  “Sarah can’t come over, sweetheart.” Nana rubs the back of her own neck. Her lips look flatter than they usually do. “I’m going to see her later, and I’ll tell her you asked about her.”

  “Could I come too?”

  “It’s not a good idea. It’ll just give you nightmares.”

  Coriander leans forward over her legs, begins picking at the carpet pile.

  Nana looks away from the frantic little fingers digging into the nylon loops.

  “Do you still have bad dreams about that thing that used to come over here?”

  Still in her bent over position, Coriander shakes her head.

  “That’s good. Now you know it was bad, right?”

  Coriander keeps pulling at the pile. “She didn’t when she first met it, cause it was so close all the time she kinda got used to it, but then when she saw it go away, and like
how all the other birds that were her friends were afraid of it, plus how it made her hands and everything look…”

  “I think you were afraid of it all the time, baby. I could see it in your eyes, even when you were petting it.”

  Coriander’s bent head nods. “She was scared of it but she didn’t want to be scared of it, cause then it would know, but it really scared her every time when she’d have to put her fingers on it for the first time when it would come back. Sometimes when it wasn’t there she’d forget how scary it felt to touch it. But then it kept coming back, and then she’d want it to be near because she wasn’t touching it for the first time, she was touching it for the second or third time, and that was a little less scary.”

  She reaches for the two big knobs, head still down, and turns both at the same time, not wanting to talk anymore.

  A lopsided, silvery circle warbles over the intersections.

  Nana watches, red-eyed, as the knobs twist circle after circle over the first one, rotating around and around and around amateurishly, darkening and expanding across the neat, modest rectangles.

  Nana picks up the Etch-a-Sketch from Coriander, whose fingers still twirl a moment in mid-air, and turns it upside down, giving it a few firm shakes. “Nana has to get ready. Just draw straight lines, baby, OK? This thing isn’t designed for circles.”

  She stands up, knees cracking, and puts the toy back down in front of the child. “Nana’s going to tighten her drink a little, and by then your babysitter should be here.”

  “Will my babysitter make me a sandwich?”

  Nana walks away, high heels dangling from one hand. “I’ll ask him to, baby. We’ll see.”

  Coriander makes a face, then returns to her Etch-a-Sketch. The intersections are gone, but most of her circle is still darkening the upper left corner.

  Nana warily spies on the well-lit kitchen, one liver-spotted hand on either side of the doorway, looking from there at the microwave, the island bar, the refrigerator, the cabinets and ceiling, the floor, the counters, the window over the sink. The green readout on the black-faced microwave pulses from 6:49 to 7:00.

  She enters cautiously, advancing step by step into the alert illumination, head cocked, trying to figure out the source of the little tone noises in the air.

  At the far end of the living room, behind the curved back of an easy chair, Coriander is sitting on a shadowy patch of the carpet. She raises her head with a defensive look of explanation ready on her face.

  “Baby, what are you doing?”

  Coriander’s thin fingers, so small it’s hard to believe they each contain three joints, type another dozen times against the raised squares on the telephone’s base.

  “I’m calling my mom. She wants to talk to me.” She makes a stern Shhh! face and clumsily lifts the receiver up under her scraggly blonde hair, against her reddened ear, eyes blank.

  Nana takes the receiver away from her and hangs up on nothing.

  “You can’t call your mother. I don’t want to keep going over this, baby.”

  Coriander raises her grasping fingers up towards the phone, which is lifted away to its rightful place, a covered stretcher rolled down a corridor to a restricted area.

  “Maybe I’ll call Sarah.”

  “You can’t call Sarah either. She’s with your mom now. You have to go to bed, baby.” Nana’s fingers push a gray lock off her forehead. It immediately flops back down. “You’re so tired. Thank God you don’t know how tired you really are.”

  The covers are up to Coriander’s chin.

  The ionization in the room changes. The bare wire hangers in the closet tinkle against each other. A small pair of pink pants draped on the bureau relaxes, slides over the bureau’s edge onto the floor. The pattern of wrinkles it pools into shifts shadows, subtle as an oyster in a shell after a squirt of lemon.

  Coriander points a finger out from under the covers. “Stop it!”

  A sepia-toned sketch of mushrooms and liederhosen children revolves upwards on its surprised nail, now hanging upside down on the wall.

  The window scratches at the room.

  “I don’t let you in!”

  The scratching responds, louder and more intelligent-sounding, until the bottom half of the window jerks up an inch. The latch at the sill pops off in an arc, bouncing down her mother’s boxes. Multi-jointed claws, ten of them, curl through the open sill onto the bottom of the window, pressing against the frame so forcefully each claw flattens out.

  “Not fair.”

  The bottom half of the window slams up, lightning bolts across its panes as the shards fall forward.

  Cold air rushes in against the wallpaper.

  Her bird pokes its wide front over the sill, letting its legs explore ahead of it, all the way down the staircase of boxes to the floor. Talons grasping the room’s carpet, it reels its body bump by bump down the boxes.

  Coriander raises her little head, distressed, pulling her feet up under the blanket, keeping both worried eyes on the footboard of the bed.

  The top of the bedspread twitches against the bottom of her chin as her bird latches onto the hem resting on the floor.

  The bedspread twitches some more, meaning it must be climbing up.

  “You scare me.”

  Leg segments slanting every which way, her bird hoists itself bat-like over the edge of her bed.

  She draws her stubby legs up even higher, knees against her shoulders.

  It plucks its way up the length of the spread with the elaborate leg movements of a large insect.

  Hesitates below where her body starts under the covers, pointing its flat front at her. Because its legs are extended further than she’s ever seen it do before, it’s able to raise its abdomen six feet above the bedspread.

  Tilts its front end down at her, mewing.

  Coriander pulls the covers up to the bottoms of her nostrils. “You were a bad bird because you scared all the other birds away, plus you made my palms all different colors.”

  It mews, creaking on the scaffolding of its many legs.

  “You scare me.”

  The abdomen, suspended six feet in the air, twists moistly this way and that.

  Coriander lets one little hand appear above the top edge of the bedspread. “I know you don’t have any friends. ’Cept me.” She looks at the piled boxes, then at the front of her bird. “I do feel sorry for you ’cause all the time you go into a tree the other birds fly out.”

  Her bird advances, lowering itself. A talon scratches Coriander’s cheek, drawing blood.

  “Hey, not so rough.” Avoids looking at it, eyes terrified.

  As it does every evening, the bird yanks down her blanket, hoists itself up the length of her ladders and snakes pajamas, crawling wide and flat towards her face. Coriander pushes its shoulders up with a great deal of effort, raising its body though not disengaging its talons, so that she can see the mass of brain tumor corals underneath, and all the little whipping legs. As the bird settles on her face, she puts her short arms around its body in a frightened embrace, a little girl forced to once again get used to it.

  It scrabbles behind Coriander’s head on the pillow, nudging her neck forward to settle behind.

  Coriander reaches out a hand, trying to be like Sarah, petting the fur sprouting around a segment.

  “But you’re always my friend, whether I want you to be or not.”

  Her bird settles comfortably on her nape, clicking irregularly to itself, legs retracting, tilting Coriander’s head even further forward, roosting atop the blonde down of her nape, the delicate little hairs a mother loves, which are already discoloring.

  This Lonely Hecatomb

  Christopher Ropes

  Amanda was tired. Tired of the funeral and tired of her dad being dead. Tired of his friends and her own friends trying to comfort her and tell her what a great man he’d been. Yeah, he had been great, but none of them knew why. His greatness came in the quiet mome
nts at home, where he’d teach her that the meaning of being a strong black woman in the world was choosing her own path and pursuing it. Her former friend, dear, militant Cynthia, notably absent from the funeral despite knowing Amanda and her dad since the women had been little girls, didn’t see it that way. “You’re too fucking smart to study white man’s Western history, Mandy,” she’d said. “You need to focus on studying our history, our future, the realities we face in this screwed-up country.” The argument had lasted two hours and resulted in Amanda studying European history, just as she’d planned, Cynthia going on to specialize in African-American studies with a minor in Poli-Sci, and the two not speaking again.

  Amanda’s dad told her to follow her own genius. She cared about history, not from the dominant white male perspective, but similar to how Howard Zinn, or maybe even Michel Foucault, had studied it. The history of the little people who’d made things happen. The history of the people ground down by the system, but making it go on with their blood and bones and hard work and sometimes their carcasses. He said, “You’ll study everything from Ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome, to the world wars, and you’ll see, you’ll connect the dots, between our slavery here, and the Holocaust, between the Roman gladiators and the southern plantation ‘bucks.’ You’ll see, hon, that the world is a big ole mess of unconnected dots just waiting for someone with your brain to put it all together. And you’ll change the world in your own way, not the way some gal tells you you’ve got to. That’s not freedom, darling. That’s not.”

  But this damned wake and funeral and the post-funeral gathering, it was all too much. She’d had her hand shaken, her entire body smothered in usually unwanted embraces, all meant to comfort her, just like the empty words about how her dad had been the best man the speaker ever knew. She remembered one night when she’d been crying in bed, she must’ve been seven or eight, and he came upstairs with her teddy bear she’d lost outside earlier. He’d spent an hour and a half searching the dark yard and woods surrounding the house with a barely functional flashlight, just to bring her that teddy bear. That counted for more with her than any number of donations to civil rights-minded politicians, or speeches given to the plumbers’ union, or benches at parks and plaques at zoos that bore his name because some rich liberal had decided to donate in the wake of his accident.